1. These Folks Never Give Up

You may remember my little discussion about the bunch of amateurs at a social services agency who totally screwed up a new IT project. They managed to saddle their staff of mobile social workers with gigantic notebooks that couldn't be used to capture data on-site because of their (the notebooks' not the social workers') size and weight. If that wasn't enough the social workers spent hours filling in MS Word forms, which they then printed, filed and sent to data entry just as they did with the old paper and pencil forms. Printing a double-sided form caused a real problem, which was solved by printing each side of the form on a single piece of paper manually with the social workers running back and forth between the printer and their desks to turn the paper over.

Well the geniuses at America's funniest social services agency didn't stop there. No, they had to really challenge my sense of design by further meddling with the brain damaged system they created. This time they decided to "solve" the double-sided printing problem.

The social workers were about to rebel at having to leave their desks and phones every few minutes to "flip the filppin' paper over" as one of them said. I gently reminded my friend, who is a social worker at the agency and who introduced me to the challenged system in the first place, that a simple solution might be to buy a few lower priced double-sided printers like HP's $300 1320. By this time she was totally with me, having bought a 1320 for her home where she easily printed both her single- and double-sided forms at night. But, as I reported earlier, she like her colleagues was scared to death that she'd be fired for suggesting that her boss and her boss's bosses might have erred in creating the 11 pound pencil system.

However, my friend did let her colleagues and her boss know that she had bought the printer. Her boss told her boss and the boss quickly shot down the idea of buying the printers, saying that $300 for a printer was too rich for their blood.

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